


need not be precisely named

by Ani



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: M/M, Romance, sexuality is confusing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-22
Updated: 2012-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-31 14:28:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ani/pseuds/Ani
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>thing (θɪŋ)<br/>— n<br/>3.	an object or entity that cannot or need not be precisely named.</p><p>"Sherlock isn’t a memento person.</p><p>He doesn’t consider the object to be commensurate with its experience, imbued with the emotion of its origin, a feat of time-travel in memory. John does."</p>
            </blockquote>





	need not be precisely named

**Author's Note:**

> This story is a blend of Series 2 canon. The case stories are invented or allusions to the original canon but mostly drawn from John's blog, all placed after (instead of during) the Irene arc, and the story takes place between Belgravia and Baskerville.

 

            Sherlock isn’t a memento person.

            He doesn’t consider the object to be commensurate with its experience, imbued with the emotion of its origin, a feat of time-travel in memory. John does. John was a collector as a child: bits of quartz and ticket stubs and notes from girl friends because they were bored, explaining how bored they were. The army had stripped this from him with a stern ease but once “this flat with a madman” became “this flat with a madman, my best friend, which is home” (an incredibly fast transition, in hindsight) his innate fondness for objects crept back into his hands. He found jumpers and bought books and kept a strain of ephemera in his dresser drawers, newspaper clippings of their adventures and tickets from the concerts Sherlock took them to and menus from the trips they took on cases.

            One might assume Sherlock is the same way, looking at the disorder of the living room that is essentially, almost wholly his: the post slid everywhere and the tobacco in the slipper and paper pinned to walls and coffee mugs with colonizing mold. But his mess is incidental. Things come, and things go, and it doesn’t really matter to Sherlock. He keeps what he needs, for the cases, notes, objects only preserved if there is untranslatable information in them. The rest of his life flows through and away, treated like his data, precious until useless and then casually, heartlessly deleted. He has his pinned bat and old jack knife and the antelope skull with its headphones (John _really_ needs to ask about that, one of these days) but if a fire took them away Sherlock wouldn’t mourn them, the way most people do, for what signifies their existence. His violin is precious and the human skull possibly his pet but he doesn’t keep record of his life. John supposes that it’s not necessary. Normal people do it because otherwise they might forget. Sherlock will either never forget or never regret forgetting. And maybe it’s a good thing, that Sherlock doesn’t need to catalogue each case with stuff. The flat is cramped as it is and it wouldn’t really help, would it, the memento thing, with Donavan’s crazed and repeated insistence that Sherlock is a secret serial killer.

            Anyway. It’s why John is surprised to find the phone. He’s rummaging through every drawer in the hopeless search for one more tea bag (and if you think finding a teabag in a random drawer is unlikely then you are not prepared for ears-in-the-icebox-221b) when he uncovers it under junk mail and a handful of pens. It’s obviously Irene’s phone and just as obviously is useless to keep. The data in and on it has been erased, destroyed, emptied. It’s not a relic of a case, John knows. It’s a relic of an experience.

            And Sherlock has kept it.

            John thinks about that. He thinks about it all day, while he washes the dishes and starts a new post for the blog and makes a shopping list and doodles on it.

            He tries to reason through it, the way Sherlock would want him to. The way the phone makes him feel is not reasonable.

 

 

 

            John spends a lot of time online. Probably too much, although he justifies it as part of his job, now that he’s (somehow) gone from picking up shifts at the clinic to being Sherlock’s biographer and... partner. (“Now there are two consulting detectives,” he had joked one night, and Sherlock had said, “Please, John, we know that at very best you provide 40% of the work,” which was 40% true and 100% completely irritating. He does the maths wrong in his head because he knows that would annoy Sherlock.)

            Partner is just a bad choice of words because everyone, seriously _everyone_ , assumes that they are partners in a romantic, sexual, starry-eyed sense. John has mostly given up on correcting people but he is damned if he’s going to help the rumors.

            (He realizes this vehemence is also unreasonable.)

            But it is online that he does some research on the topic. The internet has catalogued sexuality in fascinatingly precise and disturbingly comprehensive ways. He considers the vocabulary, and has come to these conclusions:

            Sherlock is asexual. (This has been his leading guess for some time now.)

            Sherlock is demisexual. (This word, wikipedia tells him, describes a person who is attracted to people regardless of body but on only the basis of mind and personality. Should Sherlock ever be attracted to someone, John figures, it would be as such.)

            Sherlock is gay. (This was John’s first assumption, based partly on the way he was dressed but mostly because everyone who already knew Sherlock and was meeting John for the first time just assumed John was Sherlock’s boyfriend, _so._ This, as an answer, would still not surprise him.)

            The likelihood that Sherlock is an inexperienced heterosexual occurs to John only very late, with the realization that as a proper theorist he should consider every avenue. He contemplates the option. He looks up at Sherlock, who is tuning his violin while he stares at the fireplace, his eyes looking out but mind turned inward. He’s wearing that purple shirt. _That_ shirt. No, John thinks, and turns hurriedly back to his laptop, I don’t think Sherlock is going to come out as straight.

            This doesn’t answer his question about the phone. John decides to throw it out of his mind and take a shower. He’s just stepped in when Sherlock shouts something about it being the _jellyfish,_ of _course_ , and demanding that John follow right now or he’s going to miss the rest of the case.

 

 

 

            John missed the first part of this investigation, doing something very silly and needless he calls “sleeping”, which is why he finds the phone that morning, when Sherlock is out. The rest of the case involves a trip to the aquarium, a trip to an exotic fish market, a knife fight, a swim in pantyhose, and quite a few antihistamines. The Episode of Buying Pantyhose is not going into the blog. The knife fight ends in no injuries (to them). In three days the dust has settled, and John has plied Sherlock into eating three bowls of sweet and sour soup and then passing out on the sofa. Which was not _quite_ his goal, but he’ll take it.

            Opening his laptop, to type up notes, he finds three tabs open on _Cyanea,_ two on properly drying jellyfish and one on processing for eating it raw, two on unusually large blooms, a study on the frequency of heart attacks by age, and his abandoned tab on pansexuality, saved (or at least, not bothered to close) by Sherlock, from days ago.

            He at first worries this will make Sherlock bolt up, eyes open, make that _face_ , exclaim that John must have found the phone, and deduce everything following. He, of course, does not. He probably didn’t bother thinking about it for longer than it took to dismiss it as unimportant. John wonders if he could trick Sherlock into suspecting Something if he left a careful trail of tabs open, or history just-barely erased, and decides to keep that idea for a rainy oh-god-he’s-shooting-the-walls-day.

            Pansexuality had been, he decided, not so different from demisexuality as to list it separately.

            He closes the whole block of tabs and stares at his keys.

            Irene, John thinks, was almost as hard to classify. She might be bi (pan, demi, et al - John wonders if there is an “etalsexuality”, and decides, probably) and identify, for whatever personal or political reason, as gay. Which is quite fine; John knows Clara is bisexual but has called herself a lesbian since she was fifteen. Or maybe she’s only attracted to women, and men are just for work, and Sherlock is The Exception.

            The Women - The Exception. That has been wriggling in John’s mind like a loose tooth.

            Irene had a crush on Sherlock. Fine. She was attracted to him, fine.

            Did Sherlock have a crush on _her_?

            John slams the lid shut and decides to read a damn book already. It bothers him that this is bothering him so much.

 

 

 

            “You should really quit,” John tells him.

            Sherlock slaps on another patch just to irritate him.

            “It’s a distraction. What if we’re on a case and the craving flares up and takes you away from your work?”

            “I’ll ignore it.”

            “You could ignore it _now_.”

            Sherlock picks up the box for a third one and there is a brief wrestling match. John ends up throwing the box out the window and so Sherlock smacks his shoulder and so John punches back, fairly gently, just as a warning, and Sherlock tries to kick him while sprawled out on the sofa, which isn’t very efficient, and so John grabs his foot and glares at him, just holding it in the air, and it’s so ridiculous they both start gigging.

            But Sherlock doesn’t always ignore his body on a case, does he? John knows that now.

 

 

 

            John _suspects_ that now.

            Apparently it is futile to dwell on anything else, so he starts making his mental lists again, while he is hanging up his laundry. Sherlock is in the kitchen piercing human ears with a stapler. John suspects this is less “for science” and more “for my mad whims” but he doesn’t want to ask. A lot of living with Sherlock is a willingness to not ask.

            This, seemingly, is not one of them.

            Did Sherlock have a crush on Irene? Because, from the outside, that seemed the easiest way to categorize it. That was what he thought, at first, and it would be disproved only to come flaring back. It’s what the phone makes him think. The phone, and the song on the violin, and Sherlock’s mysterious absence from the flat for four days. But it also doesn’t seem quite _right_.

 

 

 

            John has a breakthrough. Epiphany must be catching because it comes, like some of Sherlock’s, from something totally disconnected to the mystery at hand. He is dusting the bookshelves - one of the other changes, in becoming Sherlock’s full-time blogger, is that he has an awful lot of down-time inbetween the weeks he can’t spare a second to breathe. He hasn’t quite settled on a hobby so to keep his hands quiet he cleans a lot. No one can even notice. This day he’s dusting and he finds a copy of Verne.

            It’s not his, so it must be Sherlock’s, whose taste in relaxation reading does exist (in fact, Sherlock reads a terrible amount of Poe, of which John only makes the mistake of asking about the detective _once_ ). It’s _Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea_. John first read this book in fourth grade, from a library sale where he’d gotten it for 50p. He’d fallen in love with it. Just smashingly besotted, reading it over and over, until the words became a sort of trance he slid through because he already knew them so well. He couldn’t say at the time, or now, why he liked it so much, and his fondness for it now is almost entirely nostalgic, but there it is: for awhile, that book was everything. He feels a pang for his old copy, the one with the blue-sleek ship gliding by pink, waving arms reaching out of a terrible depth, the one that smelled like soft dirt and was growing yellow by the time he found it. This copy is hardback, stiff, thick creamy paper with ruffled edges.

            But he understands, all of a sudden.

            Sherlock had a crush but it wasn’t sexual. It was pure admiration. Irene played people with a skill set Sherlock didn’t have; she used body and emotion the way he used fact and detail. She was cunning and successful and smart. It was an intellectual-crush, like a book-love, an interest in someone’s carefully constructed work that seems so, _so_ real, even when you know it isn’t, a falling-for that isn’t falling-into. Irene desired Sherlock but Sherlock didn’t desire her... or at least, didn’t desire anything more than the spark of understanding, one genius recognizing another, the scientist passing the actress in a hall and finding a bewildering mirror.

            Sherlock has very few people like that. He has a few people he _loves_ , like Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft (...probably) and a few he likes and even respects (Lestrade and... Lestrade). How many equals does he meet? (And the ones he does, they’re always trying to murder him.)

            John wonders if there isn’t a like-minded soul out there for Sherlock, somewhere. But now he knows Irene wasn’t. She was The Woman, but not _the_ woman.

            He is pleased at this insight and wishes he had someone to mention it to.

 

 

 

            “Problem?” Mike asks, when their glasses are refilled and set in front of them.

            “Nah,” John says. “How’s Nancy doing?”

            Mike cheerily updates John on the family while they drain their lagers away. John is happy to hear it all. He eats a handful of peanuts because they’re there.

            The problem that he does not describe to Mike is this: John figured that the Thoughts that Wouldn’t Go Away were so because they were unsolved. That the mystery was itching at him but, once clarified and defined and put back into a box, would leave. (Yes, John realizes how much Sherlock is rubbing off on him, thank you very much.)

            But it’s still there. Floating in the background, occasionally rustling its wings, as if in gentle reminder. John finds this very annoying. He decides he is absolutely not wasting anymore time on it and is very successful, especially when they get another case ( _especially_ when they have to go buy _ninja costumes_.)

 

 

 

 

            They hit another lull.

            Sherlock is still coasting off the thrill of several good mysteries in a row, doing some background research, catching back up on sleep. Watching him slide out of his room in a sheet, drop it on the living room floor when he spots his robe, putting on his robe and gathering the sheet and getting a cup of coffee, makes John think the Thoughts that Wouldn’t again. If he’s getting to the point that _Sherlock_ is dealing with a peaceful break better than he is, he is due for a serious conversation with reality.

            Sherlock declines the offer and advice of food, and says something about buying a harpoon, and leaves. John walks down to the Thai place for take-away. The cashier hands him his small brown bag and asks if his boyfriend out of town again.

            “Thanks,” he says, and does not bother to answer her question. He walks back and sits in his chair to eat the noodles because the kitchen is under a constant zone of suspicion, after the last washing-up argument that may or may not have involved thrown towels, spoons, deliberate spilling of bicarb, some shouting about basic hygiene, and Mrs. Hudson asking them to keep down their domestic, she’s only just turned on the telly. He wonders what the hell Sherlock wants with a harpoon. He is relieved Sherlock did not ask him to accompany him, and a bit sad, as he always is when Sherlock vanishes without statement or doesn’t know it when it’s John that leaves, although John does so with clear notice. When John leaves for a date and comes back (unsuccessful) two hours later and Sherlock is (still?) talking to him John wonders if Sherlock really realizes he’s there, really cares.

            In this short outline of people Sherlock likes John is not entirely sure where to put himself. Perhaps John is unique category, but he would like some clues.

            Like everyone else Irene had insisted that he and Sherlock were a couple. I’m _not gay_ , he’d said, because even his _girlfriends_ thought he was in love with Sherlock and it was making him a little tetchy, and Irene had said that _she_ was, but, implication being clear, she was in love with Sherlock anyway, and so was John.

            That hadn’t ended well for Irene. _If_ John _was_ in love with Sherlock, if Sherlock was his Exception it wasn’t something he was going to admit to Sherlock or to himself. Because he saw what happened to Irene. To Molly. He couldn’t deal with not reaching Sherlock, in the end, there, not being Sherlock’s Exception...

            But he wasn’t, so he didn’t have to worry about it.

 

 

            The harpoon ends up in a corner for a couple of weeks. John is not sure what is going to happen with it but eyes it warily just the same. There’s another case, poor Julia and poor Helen, snakes and poison and Lestrade pointing out that it’s perfectly _rational_ not to like snakes, which are venomous, and everywhere. Sherlock points out positive cultural associations with snakes. Lestrade is not impressed. Anderson says he considered being a herpetologist. No one cares. Sherlock points this out loudly. They make fun of him in the cab ride back, and when they return home and Sherlock veers off for his own private world, John coaxes him back out, to stay with him in conversation, and when Sherlock relents to eat some toast and makes eye contact instead of saying thank you, John pats him on the shoulder, half condescendingly and half affectionately, and Sherlock smiles, but it’s pure affection.

            Fuck, John realizes, I _am_ in love with Sherlock Holmes.

 

 

 

            Fuck.

 

 

 

            “Can you love someone without being attracted to them?” This question is directed at the next person who will listen. That happens to be Molly, as they check in on the hanged corpse of the stepfather.

            “Uhm, I suppose,” she says. “Yes, I think-” then her eyes widen and her thin lips make a perfect ‘o’. “Are you talking about Sherlock?”

            “I,” he says, scrambling for a way to back out.

            “I think Sherlock could love someone without being attracted to them,” she whispers back. She is whispering even though Sherlock is in the hallway, texting. This is probably wise.

            “Ah, yes,” he says. “Someone, uhm, someone once said that about him.”

            “It was that woman, wasn’t it. The one that made him so sad.”

            Molly is occasionally frighteningly perceptive.

            “She said he was in love with me. I mean, I think.” He says this quickly so he only has time to regret it. John needs a reality check. Apparently he’s asking _Molly_ for it. He realizes this might have been cruel when she sighs and says, grumpily, “It’s _always_ gay men.”

            “No, I don’t mean-”

            But Sherlock swings back in and the correction cannot be made. John’s not sure how to correct it anyway.

 

 

 

            John wonders if his love for Sherlock is purely platonic. He knows it’s become something....else.... since the pool. Since the moment they learned they would die for each other. Since every moment after when they decide to live for each other, to eat and sleep and get up in the morning and take the other with them when they run down dark alleys. Something deep and soul-knitting. It’s why he puts up with the insults and the severed thumbs and the fact that he can’t keep a girlfriend and that that’s really only fair. It _is_ a bit romantic, he realizes. But he’s not sure it’s not just misplaced admiration, desire unmet and so undirected, maybe he doesn’t _really_ feel -

            John is thinking this as he’s shaving in the mirror. Sherlock walks in and strips, quickly, without saying a word, before jumping into the shower, spraying cold water on himself without shutting the curtain or waiting for it to warm. “Acid,” he says. “Avoid the kitchen.”

            “Thank you,” he responds, pleased that Sherlock is bothering to warn him. He’s really very, _very_ pleased with the whole clothes-eating-acid situation. That’s a remarkably poor time to confirm his suspicions, but there you are.

 

 

 

            John’s never kissed a man. He’s thought about it, a few times, but he really liked women and they really liked him so...

            Now he thinks about kissing Sherlock.

            More than is really appropriate.

            He wishes Irene were still alive, so he could text _we share an Exception_. She would probably giggle. She would patiently explain that of course this was happening now, after her presence had invoked jealousy. She’d say, _I was a catalyst_ and _I pointed out how you feel, when you were threatened for his affections for the first time_ and _it’s okay that this is taking awhile, it’s new to you_ or some other sort of perfect wisdom. She’d probably do it naked. That thought is even more confusing, so John decides, just, _no_.

 

 

 

            The question John has now is whether Sherlock has an Exception. And if that’s John.

            He has no way of knowing without outright asking. Fortunately he knows Sherlock will remain eternally unaware of any crush on him and so they can just continue, as they are, forever. Until Sherlock finds someone or until he... doesn’t, and they’re still like they are, which is just fine.

            Just fine.

 

 

 

            The whole hat thing happens not long after. The hat thing is adorable. John feels no compunction about using that word: _adorable_. It’s a stupid looking hat and looks just completely ridiculous on Sherlock but now they start getting pictures from people drawing him in it and the photos are everywhere and it makes Sherlock grumpy in the most pleasant way. John is enjoying this terribly until one night Anderson says it makes him look hideous.

            Sherlock says, “But I can take off the hat,” which is a pretty good comeback, and Lestrade barely hides his smirk, but when they’re alone, leaving the dump site for the dead man’s house, John says, “He’s wrong, you know. You look...fine. Great. You always look great.”

            Sherlock doesn’t bother to respond to it.

 

 

 

            The next morning, Sherlock is still awake, reading five-year-old news articles online. John puts the kettle on.

            “John,” Sherlock says, and hesitates. “About my appearance. Was that a come-on or a reassurance? Because-”

            “No, no,” John says quickly, meaning no, to the first. He reaches for a joke. “You would know it if I were coming on to you.”

            “Would I?”

            John is going to point out that Sherlock can figure out how long he spent brushing by the creases in his shirt when he realizes that this is an honest question.

            “Well, to start with, I’d kiss you.”

            Sherlock nods, and goes back to reading.

 

 

 

            This topic does not come back up for day after day. John assumes this means it is settled. John assumes this means that everything is settled and that, whatever Sherlock feels for him, it is not quite the same. That’s fine, John tells himself. It’ll be fine.

            He tries a few dates. They go well until they’re not Sherlock, so he stops trying.

 

 

 

            “I really want you to quit,” he says, when Sherlock looks like a nicotine patchwork quilt. It’s not even for the case. He’s just bored.

            “I really want you to stop repeating information we both know,” Sherlock says, to be an ass.

            “Sherlock, so help me, if I put my life at risk every day for us to escape serial killers and Czech assassins and mastermind criminals, and then you die from cancer, I am going to murder you.”

            “When I’m already dead?”

            “I will murder you as you are suffering from cancer.”

            Sherlock lifts an eyebrow. It is an exquisite retort. John finds he is actually angry.

            “Sherlock, really. I _need_ you to stay around.”

            Sherlock looks at the patches on his arms, the white squares speckled on his pale skin. Then he rips them off and stands up, in front of John, and looks very suddenly, strangely serious.

            “Why?” His eyes are darting around John’s face, seeking information, drawing potential conclusions, but John decides to answer for him.

            “Because I love you, you idiot.”

            He is going to add, “You’re my friend.”

            But he doesn’t have a chance.

            Because Sherlock carefully places his hands on John’s face, gently, like they are both scared animals about to scatter, and he closes his eyes like this is something he has memorized and he is looking up an internal diagram. John knows it is going to happen before it does.

            Sherlock kisses him.

            “Is this the right way?” he asks, breaking it off, quickly, far too soon, John almost stumbling after. John says, “Yes. I’ll show you.” and Sherlock says “I’ll quit.” and John says “Good.” and Sherlock says “I think I love you too. This is that? Yes?” and John says “Yes.” and he can be sure enough for both of them, but he doesn’t have to be.

 

 

 

            Sherlock is an absolute, terrible ass when he is quitting. Fortunately John has a new way to distract him.

            He still hasn’t properly categorized it, Sherlock’s or his own or what their relationship is, now, exactly. Partners is good. Partners is newly good although not... complete, somehow. Exceptionally Exceptional, he thinks, grinning to himself. He kisses Sherlock even though Sherlock doesn’t deserve it and has just undone a week’s worth of tidying in about four minutes searching for what he promised he wouldn’t have.

            There is still a lot they will have to figure out. But soon, a man named Henry is going to walk in, and they will have a new case, and not long after that they’ll be in Dartmoor and John will be told, “Sorry, we couldn’t get you a double.” And John will say, “That’s fine.” And this time he won’t need to correct the inevitable mistake because it’s no longer a mistake and, probably, never was.

            Then they’ll go break into a military base to investigate a rabbit.

 

 

 


End file.
